The centennial of Social Forces provides an opportunity to examine change and stability in crime research in one of sociology’s oldest journals. Since the first issue of Social Forces in 1922, crime and punishment have transitioned from marginal topics subsumed under the umbrella of deviance studies to a central research area. This essay traces the intellectual development of crime research as captured in Social Forces’ pages and contrasts it with the growing independence of criminology as an academic field. To do so, I employ two analyses. First, I examine the topical classifications provided by Moody, Edelmann and Light (2022). Second, I expand upon these classifications by using structural topic models (STM) to detect clusters of crime research activity in Social Forces’ abstracts and group them into “eras” of crime research. The analysis reveals a circular development of crime research in Social Forces that reflects broader trends in the sociology of crime. 1 Themes of power, stratification, and punishment oriented early studies on crime. Research attention focused on inequality within the justice system, the effects of juvenile justice contact on criminal labeling and recidivism, and inequalities resulting from justice system contact. However, as crime rates rose throughout the Western world, Social Forces articles sought to explain the causes of crime and evaluate policies designed to cull the crime wave. In recent decades, persistent crime declines combined with growing concern with an oversized prison system have refocused attention on incarceration and its collateral consequences, especially for adolescent well-being and racial and class inequalities. In this way, crime research in Social Forces has returned to core themes of power and stratification that motivated early work in the sociology of crime. It has also distanced itself from individual etiology and policy studies that once dominated the journal’s pages and that continue to appear in specialist outlets.

中文翻译：

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社会力量犯罪研究的前世今生：犯罪社会学如何失本寻根

社会力量百年纪念提供了一个机会，可以在社会学最古老的期刊之一中检验犯罪研究的变化和稳定性。自 1922 年第一期《社会力量》以来，犯罪和惩罚已经从被归入越轨研究范畴的边缘主题转变为一个中心研究领域。这篇文章追溯了社会力量页面中犯罪研究的智力发展，并将其与犯罪学作为一个学术领域的日益独立性进行了对比。为此，我采用了两种分析。首先，我检查了 Moody、Edelmann 和 Light (2022) 提供的主题分类。其次，我通过使用结构主题模型 (STM) 来扩展这些分类，以检测社会力量摘要中的犯罪研究活动集群，并将它们分组到犯罪研究的“时代”中。该分析揭示了社会力量中犯罪研究的循环发展，反映了犯罪社会学的更广泛趋势。1 以权力、分层和惩罚为主题的早期犯罪研究。研究重点集中在司法系统内部的不平等、少年司法接触对犯罪标签和累犯的影响，以及司法系统接触造成的不平等。然而，随着整个西方世界的犯罪率上升，社会力量的文章试图解释犯罪的原因并评估旨在遏制犯罪浪潮的政策。近几十年来，犯罪率持续下降，加上对监狱系统规模过大的担忧日益加剧，人们将注意力重新集中在监禁及其附带后果上，尤其是青少年福祉以及种族和阶级不平等。这样，社会力量中的犯罪研究又回到了权力和分层的核心主题，这些主题激发了犯罪社会学的早期工作。它还与曾经占据期刊版面并继续出现在专业媒体上的个人病因学和政策研究保持距离。